STAR TREK: TOS - Enterprise, The First Adventure

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “It is beautiful.” He equalized the pressure between inside and outside: “I’m going to open the hatch.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to keep her from bolting.”

  The double doors slid apart. The wind of the alien world smelled dry and dusty and sweet. Despite the brightness of the worldship’s light, the air felt cool because of its low density. The high partial pressure of oxygen made Stephen dizzy and slightly drunk.

  Lindy led Athene to the open hatch. The equiraptor quivered with excitement and fear. Lindy put one hand on [273] her withers and jumped easily, gently, onto her back. She slid her legs beneath Athene’s wings and urged Athene forward with her knees. Athene hesitated, spraddle-legged, her ears pricked, her nostrils distended. She drank in the alien air.

  Suddenly she sprang into a gallop. Her wings lifted from her sides. The feathers whispered. The thin air attenuated the pounding of her hooves. Athene’s wings rose and fell and began a steady, rhythmic beat. Her hooves touched the ground more and more lightly. She leaped.

  And she flew.

  The wind fluttered Lindy’s hair behind her. She hunched close against Athene’s neck, feeling fear and wonder and joy. The cool thin wind cut through her shirt. But her heart beat furiously till she was too excited to feel the cold. Athene spread her wings and soared. She kept her legs pulled up under her as if she were leaping a high fence, the widest steeplechase jump in the universe.

  Athene dipped one wing, banked, and turned. Lindy gasped. The ground tilted toward her. Far below, Stephen gazed up at them. Athene swooped over him. He turned to follow, laughing, running, waving his arms, shouting in triumph. Behind him, Ilya scampered like a kitten.

  Sweat streamed down Athene’s shoulders and flanks and frothed to white foam where the leading edge of her wings touched her sides on the downstrokes. Her breath began to labor. Her wingbeat slowed, and she dropped toward the ground, but at the last second she lifted her head and struggled back into the sky. Lindy had no idea what signal to give her to get her to land. She sat up straighter, deeper, giving Athene the dressage signal to slow and to collect herself. Athene responded. She increased the angle at which she carried her wings. Their ground speed slowed; they descended. Athene’s wings beat in powerful downstrokes, cupping the wind. She reached for the land with her hooves like an eagle for its prey, touching into a gallop, half-running, half-gliding. Lindy collected her, easing her into a canter, guiding her in a wide circle around Stephen’s ship.

  The canter slowed to a trot. Athene ruffled her wings and folded them against her sides, covering Lindy’s legs with the [274] warmth of the blue-black feathers. Lindy was breathing harder than Athene. The wind had brought tears to her eyes. Athene jogged to Stephen. She stopped.

  Lindy slid from Athene’s back. Her knees shook and she shivered. She hugged Athene’s neck, burying her face in her thick mane. She was laughing and crying at the same time. Athene nuzzled her side.

  “You liked that, didn’t you, sweetie?” Lindy said. “I did, too. Oh, I did, too.”

  Stephen put his hand on Lindy’s shoulder. His warmth cut through the chill of the wind.

  “At first I wasn’t sure you were going to take off.” He, too, sounded breathless. “Then I wasn’t sure you were going to land.”

  Lindy wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “All those dressage lessons,” she said, “and I never learned the signal for ‘come down out of the sky.’ ”

  Stephen smiled.

  “I have to walk her,” Lindy said. “Do you have an old blanket—?”

  He disappeared into Dionysus. Lindy started Athene walking to keep her from getting stiff and sore. When Stephen returned, he offered her a light blanket that looked like white silk.

  “It’ll get awfully dirty,” she said.

  “That’s all right. It won’t mind.”

  She thought he was joking. But the blanket clasped itself to Athene, caressing her sides. Lindy touched it, curious. It had a warmth of its own.

  “What is it?”

  “A silken.”

  “Is it alive?”

  “Sort of. It’s right on the borderline. It ‘knows’ to wrap you up and keep you warm. That seems to make it happy, if you can use that word on something this far from sentient, and unhappy, too—if you don’t use it, it dies.”

  Lindy slid her hand beneath it. Athene felt dry and warm, not sweaty and overheated, where the silken touched her.

  Lindy let her walk free. Athene must have expended an enormous amount of energy in her flight, but now she showed no sign of being tired. Relaxed and energetic, she [275] strode with long, low-gravity strides. Every so often she raised her head and gazed at the strange, light-patterned sky. Her wings lifted and rustled beneath the silken.

  Lindy turned and hugged Stephen hard.

  Stephen put his arms around her and held her gently, gingerly, all too aware of his own tremendous strength. Lindy touched his cheek and brushed her fingertip along the upswept stroke of his eyebrow.

  He perceived her intelligence, her determination, and, yes, her beauty. Even Vulcans did not train all aesthetic sense out of their children. Yet Stephen felt nothing.

  He put his hand over hers, where she touched his cheek. He drew her hands away from him.

  “Lindy, don’t, please.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He turned away. “I can’t ...”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s the way Vulcans are!”

  No human being could have moved him by force. Lindy touched his elbow and turned him to face her again.

  “But you’re different,” she said.

  He sat on the skid of Dionysus. His shoulders slumped.

  “I’ve tried to be,” he said. “But I was raised a Vulcan, trained ...” He cupped his hands together, forming a sphere of air between them. “They teach you to wall off your feelings. To put them inside a shell and cover the shell, layer after layer till it’s so thick it can’t be broken. If you rebel, if you question, they take more patience with you. More time ...”

  “That’s what they did to you.”

  He nodded. “I keep chipping away at that shell, trying to break through it, hoping to—but I’m afraid if I ever do, I’ll find ... nothing.” He opened his hands and flung the space between them at the sky, like a magician producing a dove. But no dove appeared. There was nothing.

  “I’ve never loved anyone, Lindy. Someone loved me once, and I wanted ... I pretended ... But she knew. Finally she knew. I don’t want to hurt anyone ever again the way I hurt her. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Instead of drawing away, she put her arms around him and held him, offering comfort, perhaps looking for it. Stephen [276] stroked her hair, knowing his gesture to be empty and wishing, desperately, that he had some true response to give.

  He opened his eyes. His sight strangely vague, his hearing dim, he inspected his unfamiliar surroundings as best he could. The dense air smelled artificial. He longed for mountains and plains and cold wind buoying his body.

  He tried to sit up. Heavy straps bound him at chest and hips and thighs. In a fury he flung himself upright. The restraints ripped away. He knew no one of his own people so cruel and mad as to imprison another person. He had traveled to the newcomers’ ship, trusting their gestures of peace, and they had responded by trying to cripple him.

  He prowled the angular room. He felt as if he were looking at two images, one well known and one completely strange. The part of his mind that identified the image as alien drove him to escape; the part that recognized it helped him find a way out.

  A creature sat near the entrance, studying some strange object. It was personlike in form, but it wore protective garments as if it planned to go into space outside a sailboat. If it saw him he might have to injure it to pass, and no matter what its people had done to him, he would never stoop to their barbarian ways.

  He moved stealthily toward the creature. But his body seemed alien to him. He stumbled. The creature saw hi
m and leaped up.

  “Spock!” it said.

  It never felt him touch it at the junction of neck and shoulder, it never felt unconsciousness overcome it. It never felt itself fall. He caught it and laid it down.

  Careful to avoid detection, he walked through the low-ceilinged corridors. He found the familiar yet alien mechanism he sought. As he changed the settings, he mused upon the device. It was ingenious, but primitive and poorly executed, with all these mechanical parts and electronic circuits. He would have designed it to reply to the touch of the mind.

  He climbed onto the platform and waited out the delay until the beam dissolved him.

  [277] He re-formed within the sailboat. Beyond the translucent walls of the spherical chamber, the bulk of the Enterprise hovered nearby, and the gently curved bowl of the worldship glowed and shimmered at a great distance. The boat’s sail rippled in concentric circles that trembled from its outer border to its center and back to its edge again, forming interference patterns where they crossed.

  The flexible glassy spines that formed the shrouds of the sail grew from the exterior surface of the chamber. On the interior, the bases of the spines formed eight-pointed stars, translucent at the points, pearly within, a brilliant point at the very center, where the spine collected light and concentrated it.

  The spines flexed and changed, altering the set of the sail. For a moment the sail trembled and twisted uselessly and the sailboat fell toward the worldship, caught by its gravity. He stroked the bases of the spines; the spines contorted again. The sail caught the power beam, straightened, filled. The sail acted as a brake, a parachute catching photons instead of air, changing the boat’s headlong fall into a steady, slow descent.

  He was going home.

  The shuttlecraft Copernicus had traveled half the distance to the worldship. Sulu flew; Uhura took the copilot’s seat and continued trying to get some response from Stephen. Jim paced in the cramped space and fumed at the Vulcan’s impulsive stubbornness.

  Cloud Touching, pleading hunger, had transported back to the worldship, but the other three flyers came along for the ride, poking around and asking questions about the instruments, the layout, the uses of the craft. They acted as if the trip were a picnic. Perhaps, for them, it was.

  Jim was glad both Sulu and Uhura had volunteered to come along, because he was fully occupied keeping the flyers from dissecting the shuttlecraft out of curiosity.

  “Which of your companionship has taken up sailing, James?” Scarlet said without any hint of anger.

  The flyers’ sailboat sped past Copernicus, falling toward the worldship and vanishing into the distance of complex visual and electromagnetic background noise.

  “I don’t know,” Jim said.

  [278] “Enterprise signaling, captain.”

  “Scott here, captain. ’Tis Mr. Spock—he’s escaped from sick bay! He used the transporter—”

  “—and stole the sailboat,” Jim said. “So I see. Is Dr. McCoy—?”

  “He isna hurt, captain, but Mr. Spock left him wi’ a monster headache. ’Twas the nerve-pinch ...”

  Jim had no idea what Scott was talking about, not that it mattered.

  “Commander Spock is on his own just as he was before. If we see him, we’ll bring him back. If we don’t—I’m sorry for him.”

  “But, captain—”

  Jim nodded to Uhura to close the channel. Unbelieving, she obeyed.

  Feeling stunned, she tried again to reach Stephen.

  “Copernicus calling Dionysus, come in please. This is an emergency—please respond.” Again, the only reply was the static of the worldship’s magnetic field, and silence.

  Scarlet flexed wing-fingers and closed them. “James, is it important that your contact with Stephen be conducted through your machines?”

  “That’s the only way we—can you contact him? Is that what you mean?”

  “I have already requested that the companionship watch for Spock. If you wish, I will ask them to look for Dionysus and Stephen as well.”

  “Scarlet, I would be grateful—if anyone sees Lindy, please tell them to tell her how important it is that she come back.”

  “That is more difficult. Cloud Touching will convey your language to those who want it, when he finishes hunting, and Green and Sun-and-Shadows and I will convey it to others when we return. But until then, no one else on the worldship speaks Standard.”

  “Can’t you transmit it mind to mind?”

  Scarlet regarded Jim curiously. “Could you teach someone to listen by giving them things to smell? Could you teach someone to feel by demonstrating colors?”

  “Of course not.”

  [279] “In the same way, I cannot pass on a new method of speech without speaking.”

  “But that’s how Spock taught it to you!”

  “But I am different,” Scarlet said patiently. “James, you saw me, you heard me, give your language to Green and Cloud Touching and Sun-and-Shadows. I cannot do it as Spock did it, because Spock and I are different.”

  “I do understand that, it’s only—” Jim stopped, wrestling with frustration. “Couldn’t Cloud Touching look for Dionysus?”

  “He is hungry. When he has hunted, he may choose to search. Or perhaps he will sleep.”

  “If we don’t find Lindy and get back soon—our lives are at stake. The ship is at stake!”

  Scarlet regarded him calmly. “Yes. People live, and they die.”

  Jim felt as if he had run head-on into a wall of incomprehension. “How soon before we might hear something?”

  Scarlet touched his sensory mustache. “I do not know. I cannot even promise that anyone will tell me who sees the ship. They will if it pleases them.”

  “Is there anyone who can promise?”

  “Are you seeking someone in the worldship who holds a position analogous to yours?”

  “Please don’t be hurt, Scarlet, but, yes, I would like to calk to someone with responsibility for the worldship. I can understand why your leaders might want to observe us before revealing themselves. But surely you’ve seen enough to know we’re peaceful.”

  “I believe that your intentions are peaceful because of what I learned from Spock,” Scarlet said. “But what I have observed is that your ship carries engines of destruction.” Scarlet waved off Jim’s objection. “That is all beside the point. There is no person who leads. The worldship has neither leaders nor followers.”

  “What do you have? Anarchy?”

  “I have myself. I live my life as I choose.”

  “I don’t understand how your system works—I don’t understand your organization. Who directs the worldship? Who designed it, and why, and where are they? Who decides [280] what will happen to it? Who put you on it? Is there another species of people?”

  “Too many of your concepts have no analogy on the worldship. I am different from you. The group of all flying people is different from the group of all Enterprise people. The people who created the worldship are dead, many generations, a few generations. I hope that the people who must decide the worldship’s fate have not yet been born.”

  Jim blew out his breath in frustration. The more questions he asked Scarlet, the less he knew. His instinct urged trust, but his judgment made him question the truth, at least the completeness, of what Scarlet said. No leaders, no builders, no direction for a construct the size and complexity of the worldship: he found this all very difficult to accept or even grasp.

  Philosophical problems like truth would have to wait.

  “If you’d ask the other people in the worldship to look for Dionysus,” Jim said to Scarlet, “and to let you know if they see it, I’d be very grateful.”

  The diaphanous appearance of the worldship’s outer skin resolved itself into the pebbled surface of close-packed spheres. The sailboat touched a landing extension. The shroud-spines contracted, furling the sail. The free spines curled around the extension. The boat slid downward, slowing, coming to rest against the surface of the worl
dship.

  He drew the boat’s operculum from the ventral opening. The boat had matched its opening to a similar circular opening, closed by a similar pearly disk, in a larger, more thickly walled sphere that formed a part of the worldship’s wall. The silky webbing that held the spheres together also sealed the connection between sailboat and worldship, keeping the air inside.

  He pushed the second operculum away and entered the worldship wall.

  The familiar gray illumination welcomed him. Yet he found himself, confused and unhappy, seeking a darker, redder light.

  The sphere against which he had landed contained nothing but a large builder, creeping along the ceiling, leaving a slow trail of hardening pearl as it searched for a new sphere in [281] which to take up residence. He hoped it would not move into the sailboat. If it did, it would ooze in through the ventral opening and make the interior its home. While it lived there it would add two or three coats of pearl to the inside, thickening the wall till it squeezed itself from its habitation and must seek a larger one.

  Once a sphere accumulated enough coats to turn opaque, it no longer made a good sailboat. It was possible, but pointless, to sail without being able to see. The joy of sailing lay in the search for the delicate photon winds of space and in admiring the stars.

  He had replaced the sailboat’s operculum. The builder might believe another of its kind still lived within. It might crawl on till it found a more welcoming spot to house its large sluggish form.

  Making his way through layers of interconnecting spheres, he headed always inward. As usual, the routes through the wall had changed. A large, fully adult builder would slowly press its way between spheres and secrete a new, thin-shelled sphere, changing some paths and closing others completely. A younger, medium-sized builder would move into an unoccupied sphere and temporarily obstruct the way; or a smaller builder would leave interior layers that reduced the size of the chamber till a person could no longer pass. Eventually every sphere closed up completely but for the smallest passage from major dorsal to major ventral opening, and even the most juvenile builder could no longer live within. Then the weavers would eject the solid sphere from the wall, and, when the universe moved around the worldship, it would carry away the enormous unstrung pearls, like a river swirling soap bubbles to the sea.